Every year around June, the
high-altitude air current known as the jet stream lunges
into the Himalayas, whose towering 8,000-meter peaks
slice it into two branches that soar eastward over Asia
toward the Pacific. Near Japan, they finally reunite and
embrace between them a colossal mass of cold oceanic air
lying off Hokkaido.

Meanwhile, as the whole of
Asia begins to cook in the summer sun, a hot air mass
develops over the continent, setting off a vast
northeastward migration of air along the East Asian
coastline. The flow encounters a burgeoning accumulation
of damp air centered off Micronesia, helping to draw it
toward the continent.

There is conflict in the
heavens: The warm air wants to spread out, but the cold
air puts up resistance. The two titans clash.

Any resident of the region
knows what happens next. Water vapor in the wet air mass
condenses, and the result is weeks and weeks of cloud and
rain over Japan, eastern China and South Korea -- the
period of East Asia's weather cycle known in Japanese as tsuyu.
This year, the umbrellas came out on May 10 in Okinawa,
fully a month before the rains came to Shikoku, Kyushu
and Honshu last week. Hokkaido has no distinct tsuyu
season.

Irksome it may be, but the
monthlong summer rain is what gives Japan's forests and
gardens their lushness. Without it, hydrangeas and irises
would not be the seasonal splendors they are. Indeed, the
name tsuyu itself signifies fruition: The Chinese
characters used to write it are those for
"plum" (or, more accurately, "Japanese
apricot") and "rain" -- a pairing probably
chosen because tsuyu arrives just as the succulent fruits
are ripening. And were it not for tsuyu, the rice
cultivation that is the basis of Japan's culture and
psyche would not be possible.

"People have to be
strong to plant rice stalks one by one or to yank weeds
in the sweltering heat of summer. They band
together," said Yoshio Masuda, professor emeritus of
cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo. Despite
mechanization taking much of the toil out of farming,
that spirit hasn't died out in Japanese society, he said.
"Collectivism is still very much alive today. It's a
cultural characteristic."

And yet tsuyu is the cause of
much discontent. A fine mist hangs in the air, seeming
never to lift, and clothes stick to the skin. The warmth
and high humidity aid mildew's and mold's attempts to
colonize the nation's bathroom walls. "It drives me
nuts," says 53-year-old Tokyo housewife Sachiko
Osumi.

To battle the elements, Osumi
-- like countless other homemakers across the country --
every year implements a natsu taisaku, or
"summer action plan." To keep futons from going
musty in the closet, she stores them on wooden platforms
that allow air to flow through below. She also spreads
rattan matting across the living-room floor, so that when
her family of five recline it's cool and dry to the
touch. "Just some tricks my parents taught me,"
she explains.

Weather talk

Housewives who take a more aggressive,
less-traditional tack can choose from a bewildering array
of high-tech natsu-taisaku products available everywhere.
One major retailer stocks 25 anti-mildew agents, 38
kitchen products to prevent food poisoning -- on the rise
during tsuyu -- and 68 gizmos to absorb moisture from
shoes and clothes.

It is no overreaction.
Japan's 1,714-mm average annual precipitation --
including that from autumn's typhoons and the
all-engulfing snow of Tohoku and Hokkaido winters -- is
nearly twice the global average of 973 mm, according to
figures from the Land Ministry. Japan ranks behind only
Indonesia, the world's wettest country, New Zealand and
the Philippines in the amount of water dumped on it from
the sky.

Considering this, it's hardly
surprising that the Japanese language is rich in
evocative terminology for rain. Examples include onuke
(big coming-out), which connotes a torrential downpour,
and aoba ame (green-leaf rain), which describes
raindrops that complement the beauty of new foliage. And
that's only a tiny selection of some hundreds of names
for various forms of rain -- with more than a dozen to
describe subtle differences in tsuyu alone.

In the countryside, naturally
enough, a rich body of weather-related sayings have long
been passed down by generations of farmers who looked to
the sky for clues on when to plant or harvest. Summer
rain is, of course, a common theme. "A tsuyu that
begins with thunder won't be wet," goes one. "A
tsuyu with light rain yields a good crop," declares
another.

Daigo Yoshiyasu, a former
official at the Japan Meteorological Agency, was so
impressed by such adages that he compiled them into a
book published in 1984, in the forward of which he
observes that ancient weather wisdoms were sometimes
accurate even when the most advanced forecasting models
failed.

With so much rain
pitter-pattering through the eons, no page in the annals
of these islands has stayed completely dry. And besides
being key to Japan's agrarian development, tsuyu has
played its part in its history, too.

In perhaps the most dramatic
episode, in 1582 the feudal warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi
diverted water from the Ashimorigawa River, which was
swollen by tsuyu rains, to flood Takamatsu Castle in
present-day Okayama Prefecture. With much of the
low-lying fortress inundated, it was impossible for his
enemy within the walls to light fires to cook what little
food had survived the deluge. The defenders went hungry
and eventually surrendered, handing Hideyoshi a victory
that set him on course to taking military control of the
country and building a foundation for national unity.

More recently, during the
cataclysmic Battle of Okinawa in 1945, tsuyu clouds
benefited the retreating Japanese forces by giving them
two days of cover from U.S. aerial surveillance, said
military analyst Tadasu Kumagai. Meanwhile, he added, mud
immobilized the enemy's tanks, so delaying the eventual
conquest.

Romantic rains

However, perhaps the most crucial
intervention by weather in Japanese military history --
although not caused by tsuyu -- was that by the kamikaze,
or "divine wind," whose storms twice scattered
and sank invading Mongol armadas off northwestern Kyushu,
in 1274 and 1281. In World War II, as everyone knows, the
term was used for the suicide pilots who attacked Allied
ships.

Art and literature, too, have
felt the clammy touch of tsuyu. In Murasaki Shikibu's
11th-century classic, "The Tale of Genji,"
summer rains put young male characters in the mood for
romance -- an emotion that Japanese in the Heian Period
(794-1185) considered just another affliction of the
summer months, said professor of comparative literature
Susumu Nakanishi. "Tsuyu," he wryly observed,
"was the time when love sprouted -- like
mildew."

The famed ukiyo-e
artist Utagawa Hiroshige appears to have been oppressed
by thoughts of summer rains. In his 1857 woodblock print
titled "Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake,"
a maleficent cloud unleashes masterfully wrought streaks
of rain on pedestrians caught out on the bridge, and an
oarsman working the Sumida River below it. The sky is a
murky shade of gray, perhaps suggestive of the people's
sodden spirits.

Fast-forwarding to Japanese
cinema, we find that here, too, rain often highlights key
dramatic moments, as in the opening scene of Akira
Kurosawa's 1950 film "Rashomon," in which a
curtain of water pelts three figures huddled under a
Kyoto city gate. In the 1987 comedy "Tampopo,"
directed by Juzo Itami, a gangster shot through with
bullets bids farewell to his cloying girlfriend as rain
pours from the firmament.

The erratic nature of the
rainy season in recent years has done nothing to improve
its poor reputation. In the past decade, there has been a
rise in sudden, summer-evening thunderstorms accompanied
by intense downpours, reportedly due to a
"heat-island" effect as domes of
high-temperature air rise above extensively concreted and
asphalted conurbations such as those around Tokyo and
Osaka-Kobe.

Until now,
Japan has been making do with subway-size tunnels
designed to channel water from massive rainfalls of up to
50 mm per hour, but some of the worst new storms deliver
almost twice that. Residential flooding, once mainly the
bane of rural regions, has increasingly become an urban
blight. "Local governments can't lay new pipes fast
enough to keep up," says Seiichiro Okamoto, an
official at the Land Ministry's waste water management
division.

Though Japan's rainfall is
generous by most measures, because so many people are
packed into the country's relatively small area, the per
capita water resources (5,200 cu. meters) is only
one-fourth the world average. That means the nation needs
every drop it gets.

Some years, though, when the
air pressure of the wet air mass coming in from
Micronesia is stronger than that of its northern rival,
the rain front -- and tsuyu -- is pushed too far north to
affect Japan's main islands -- a weather condition
popularly known as karatsuyu, or "empty rainy
season."

Something along these lines
happened last year, when scant rainfall and
record-breaking temperatures prompted authorities in
several areas to order water intake by homes and
businesses to be slashed. The central government warned
that the Kanto and Chubu areas would possibly suffer
their worst water shortages in years. In the end, only
typhoon rains spared those regions a severe drought.

For the rice farmers who feed
Japan, any extreme in weather is bad news. "If
there's no rain, the crops wither. If there's not enough
sun, they don't dry sufficiently and get diseased. Output
falls by as much as half," explained Kanae Takeda, a
rice farmer in Niigata Prefecture, where some of the
tastiest varieties of the staple grow. "No rain is
trouble and too much rain is trouble."

The temperamental showers of
summer always provoke strong commentary from the
Japanese, for whom they are a fundamental part of life.
They may see it as the root of their culture and an
agricultural necessity. Some merely call it a domestic
inconvenience. But nobody denies that the character of
the people is shaped by the drops that fall on them from
cloudy skies.

"Japan is a country of
rain," said Nakanishi, the professor of literature.
"The drizzling in the spring makes people wet and
spirits begin to sink. Then in the autumn-winter period
there's more rain and it too brings on unusual emotions.
Our hearts get carried away -- and it's all because of
the rain."

The Japan Times: June 16, 2002(C) All rights reserved

This story originally
appeared in a Japan Times package on tsuyu rain: